The Beginning

A local high school needed a classroom aide and I needed a job.  That's pretty much how it began; I just needed a paycheck.  I got more.  I fell in love.

I fell in love with the classroom, the students, the teaching, the learning, and the craziness that went with it all. That was in October.  By January, I was back in college, but with a goal this time around: I was going to become a high school special education teacher.

It was about time I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up; I was in my mid-20s but was married with a one-year-old son.  My first college gig, right after high school, lasted about a year. 'Nuff said.

So here was the deal: three self-contained special education classrooms at the school for students with emotional disabilities. Self-contained in this case meant they spent pretty much the entire day in these three classrooms.  They went to one for math, one for science, and to ours for language arts and social studies.  We typically had about 10 students at a time.  These are the kids who don't look disabled.  Until they are faced with a situation that they don't have the social skills to deal with. 

Imagine the hallways of a typical high school between classes.  At some point, someone is going to accidentally run into someone else.  Most kids will say, "Oops...sorry," or, "Dude!  Watch it!" or just ignore and move on.  It's a blip in the day.  The students in our classrooms?  They see these things as personal affronts.  If someone bumps into them, they are convinced it was done on purpose because the world is out to get them and they're going to fight back.  They're the ones who will grab the other person and threaten to hit him, and sometimes follow through.  They might scream some expletives and not be able to let it go.  Some might sit down right in the hallway and cry, unable to process the event and filter their emotions like most people can.  These are not simply bad kids making bad choices.  They are kids who have been diagnosed with an emotional disability.

Let me try to very briefly explain how that works. If a student can't learn, but there's no intellectual or sensory cause or other health factors, if s/he can't maintain relationships with peers and teachers, if s/he acts inappropriately, if s/he exhibits a pervasive mood of depression, if s/he shows physical symptoms because of personal or school problems...s/he may have an emotional disability. And if s/he qualifies as a student with a disability, s/he can get special education services at school.  (This is a bare-bones description for the uninitiated...don't use this as a resource in your research, please.  Almost any other source you can find will be more useful to you, I promise.)

Yes, these are the kids I fell in love with.  Kids with anger issues, kids who cried at the drop of a hat, kids who couldn't be successful in a regular classroom setting because of these varied emotional problems.  I know, I know...what teenager doesn't have an emotional disability? Well, take your run-of-the mill teenager, if there is such a thing, and multiply by...ten, maybe?

Yep, I'd found my destiny.